What a year already!
Still at the Pentagon in its prepublication security review. Probably need to ping them soon.
It’s done at 88,000 words. Now, the hard part – editing! I’ve got some beta readers look at it but I’m also making my own edits. I think it’s in great shape; the biggest issue is pacing near the end but it’s all fixable. It’s a lot of wasted words (blog post on that soon!) to get to this point but it may be all worth it. Hoping to get it into a better state by the end of February and to the Pentagon by the end of April.
The Apophis Contingency
I put this on the back burner in favor of…
The Kuiper Dominion
The sequel to The Saturn Anomaly, and the 3rd and final book in the NASA Engineer series! I started drafting this one in January and got 6 chapters/12,000 words in before running out of steam. I’m hoping to write another 5-6 chapters and about 10,000 words in February. I would love nothing more than to close out that trilogy and show that I am able to finish a series. This will likely be my “big book” of 2026 and likely an early 2027 release based on my current Pentagon experience.
Short Stories
Wrote only about a thousand words of “The Golem of Checkpoint Charlie” but I think I’m going to finish in February. I have until June for the Rac Press call.
Outlining
I got the chapter-by-chapter outline for Lost Remnant (Grace Parkowski #4) done and have a high-level act-by-act structure for The Horsehead Incursion, Book 5 in the Dark Galaxy series that’ll be my next one to outline. I’ll likely have that done by the end of March. Also throwing around some ideas for a Roman-era time travel story I’ve had the seeds for since high school – more than hopefully soon.
Critiquing
I finished two novels in January and have two more lined up for February so I’m ahead of schedule for my 1 book/month critique goal.
Ryan M. Patrick 
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